


to build my home beside you

by aghamora



Series: Flaurel Ficlets [39]
Category: How to Get Away with Murder
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Stillbirth
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-12
Updated: 2016-04-12
Packaged: 2018-06-01 20:32:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6535264
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aghamora/pseuds/aghamora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a quiet kind of loss.</p>
            </blockquote>





	to build my home beside you

**Author's Note:**

> Not a prompt, but came to me after the episode with Annalise and her baby and wouldn't leave me alone.
> 
> Also, this went through quite a bit of editing, so if you find anything that's inconsistent, feel free to let me know.

When Laurel comes to, all she can see is blue.

Blue walls, with people in blue scrubs rushing around her, barking orders at each other in hushed, grim-sounding tones. Blue, everywhere; a blue sheet suspended in front of her, blocking her view of… She doesn’t know; she can’t tell. She must be in an operating room – that much she can deduce from the machines around her and the hard bed beneath her. The second thing she becomes conscious of is a droning, mechanical beeping in the background, _beep beep beep_ , over and over. She feels a pounding in her head, deep and searing in her skull. Her vision is fuzzy too, like she’s been pumped full of some drug, her senses dulled, eyelids drooping.

And then, she tries to move her legs, feel her feet, toes. And that’s when she realizes that she can’t move the lower half of her body.

It’s numb. All terrifyingly, completely numb.

“What’s…?” Her voice is nothing more than a weak croak, and everyone is hurrying around so quickly that she doesn’t even know if any of them will hear. “W-what’s going on – where-”

“Mrs. Delfino, you’re awake.” One of the nurses – a middle-aged woman with a kind face and warm brown eyes – notices, and strides over, speaking to her soothingly. “You were in a car accident. We’re preforming an emergency C-section for the baby, all right? Just stay calm. Everything will be all right.”

 _Oh God_. Panic shoots through her like electricity, sparking in her veins, making her stomach go sour. No. No, no, no.

The baby.

 _The baby._ She doesn’t know how she’d forgotten. It floods back to her, then, and she finds she can’t remember much at all – just the shattering of glass, the brutal force of the impact, metal colliding with metal, the sound of the driver behind them laying on their horn; it’d happened in flashes, milliseconds, so quickly she hadn’t even had time to scream. Somehow it feels like she remembers everything, and nothing, and she’s left trying to call back the memories and failing, again and again. They slip through her fingers like sand; just when she thinks she has them every time, she loses them.

“The baby,” she breathes, eyes wide, tears prickling their corners. “I… is she-”

Something flashes behind the woman’s eyes. Pity, maybe. Sorrow, most definitely, like she knows something she doesn’t want to tell her, and if Laurel were totally lucid she would scream, struggle, weep hysterically, but she’s too weak and drugged-up to do anything but stare back, horrified.

“We’re going to do everything we can, dear,” the woman tells her, giving her a smile that fails to reach her eyes. “It’ll all be okay.”

She closes her eyes, suddenly conscious of the feeling of pressure in her abdomen, poking and prodding. It’s not pain, exactly, but Laurel knows perfectly well what they’re doing: slicing her open, rummaging around her innards, and she has to squeeze her eyes shut and take deep breaths to keep from being sick at the thought. Too many drugs. They’ve given her too many drugs, and she’s too small and _God_ , she feels nauseous.

Something’s wrong. Laurel can feel it, sense it in her bones. The weight inside her, in her belly… her baby, hers and Frank’s… It feels too heavy. Too cold. Something’s wrong. It’s not moving. _She’s_ not moving. Not kicking, not stirring, and she’s always been so full of life, moving at all hours of the day, and Frank had joked so many times that she was going to give birth to a World Cup-winning soccer player. And now she’s not moving.

Maybe it’s because she’s numb. She doesn’t know. But she’s not moving, just lying there, like a tumor inside her. Not dead. _Not dead_ – no, no she won’t believe anything until this is over with. She must be wrong. She _is_ wrong.

She’s never wanted to be wrong so much before in her life.

“Frank,” she says his name, raising her voice so the nurse can hear. “Frank – call Frank-”

“Frank Delfino?” Laurel nods. “He was listed as your emergency contact in your file. We called him as soon as you came in. He should be here any-”

The distant sound of shouting, just beyond the doors of the operating room, makes the woman fall silent. Laurel doesn’t have to listen close to hear that it’s Frank, yelling something at somebody in the hallway. In fragments she’s able to catch _‘that’s the mother of my kid in there’_ and _‘not stoppin’ to put on any goddamn scrubs, lady,’_ before everything goes quiet for a moment, during which he apparently acquiesces and changes.

And then, out of nowhere, he bursts through the doors, wild-eyed and breathless, as panicked as she’s ever seen him in her life.

Just like she’d thought, he’d put on scrubs: blue, like all the rest of them, and the moment he sees her – feeble from the drugs, bleeding lightly from a gash on her forehead – he melts, his shoulders sagging. Within seconds he’s seated in the chair at her side, taking her hand and pressing desperate kisses to the back of it, again and again, like he believes if he stops she might slip away. She thinks for a moment she can almost feel Frank shaking.

“Hey,” he greets, trying and failing to muster up a comforting smile. “Hey – shit, Laurel, I’m so glad you’re… They told me-”

“Car accident,” she murmurs, the haze of the drugs hanging over her and slurring her words. “I don’t even remember it… God, I should’ve… been more careful-”

“This ain’t on you,” Frank asserts, gentle but firm. “None of this is your fault, okay? And-” His voice catches. He clears his throat to steady it. “It’s all gonna be all right. That’s what the nurse told me. We’re just gonna get to meet her sooner than we thought, is all.”

Again he tries to make himself smile reassuringly, but it falters in seconds, giving way to worry once more. Even in her state Laurel can tell he’s trying to convince himself just as much as he’s trying to convince her – and it’s not working. Not on her end, at least.

Dread. All she can feel is a huge, dark, looming sense of godawful _dread_ , crystalizing like ice in her stomach as the pressure there grows greater still. She can’t see what the doctor is doing, and sure as hell doesn’t want to; Frank looks over the sheet once to catch a glimpse, and when he glances back at her he looks pale, sick to his stomach, like he might hurl on the floor right in front of her. A cold sweat breaks out onto his forehead, glistening underneath the brutally bright fluorescent lights above them. He wipes his brow with the back of his gloved hand, swallowing hard and continuing to mutter comforting words to her that, over time, start to make less sense, grow more and more desperate to assure her that everything will be okay.

Laurel keeps her eyes locked on the grainy grey ceiling tiles. Tries to steady her breathing, even though she feels like she can’t breathe at all, like her lungs have ten-pound weights filling them. All she can hear is the beeping; Frank’s words are white noise in the background, along with the voices of the nurses and doctor as they pass scalpels and all other manner of cold metal tools. She doesn’t know what it means, the things they say, the things Frank is saying. The only thing grounding her is the sensation of his hand clutching hers, squeezing tight, and every now and then he reaches up to adjust the plastic cap on her head that holds back her hair, caressing her cheek.

He’s in the middle of doing just that – stroking her cheek, trying to summon up a smile for her sake – when it ends.

The pressure increases tenfold; she can feel something being removed from her, torn out, as they liberate the baby at last. She holds her breath when they do, thinks about sitting up to see, but decides against it, as the hustle and bustle flies into overdrive the moment she’s out. Through the throng of people, she can see the baby – her baby, her daughter, so tiny and red, dwarfed by the nurse’s arms, as they hurry her over to another table nearby to tend to her.

And Laurel waits. Waits for the sound of the infant’s wailing, the one she’s been waiting to hear for so long. Prays for it. Begs whatever higher power is up there, desperately, to make it come – but it doesn’t.

It never does.

Instead there’s just silence, as the minutes pass like hours, ticking by on the clock in the corner. More beeping. More low voices, coming from the doctor and the nurses, so many sounds but never the one she wants to hear – and when she catches the eye of one of the women standing across the room, and notices the shiny tears on her cheeks, Laurel knows it’s over. Something like a sob escapes her, her face crumpling, the sound barely human.

It’s then that Frank finally loses his cool.

“Why isn’t she cryin’?” he demands, voice gruff and strained. He rises to stand, his hand sliding out of hers. “Hey. The hell’s goin’ on?”

“Sir.” The same nurse Laurel had spoken to before steps in his way, holding up her hands. “Sir, please, we need you to remain calm.”

“Not ‘til you tell me what’s going on!” Frank tries his best to growl, but she can hear how his throat has tightened, how fast his composure is crumbling, tears threatening to approach. He tries to step past her, clenching his jaw. “Let me see her. That’s… that’s my daughter, let me-”

The nurse’s voice is sharp, now; sympathetic, but sharp. “ _Sir_. Go be with your wife. She needs you right now.”

It’s as good as a confirmation. The words only make her cry harder, tears beading hot in her eyes as she locks them on the ceiling, as if to keep them from tumbling down her cheeks. Frank stands still in the middle of the room for the longest moment in the world, hollow and hopeless as he processes the words, and when he makes his way back to her side, all the joy and anticipation – faked or real – has gone out of him. He’s pale. Eyes glistening with tears, too. He looks disbelieving, like some part of him is refusing to accept that it’s true, every inch of him screaming denial. It can’t be true. It _isn’t_ , and it is. It is.

She’s dead. Their baby is dead. Ripped out of her. Dead, before she’d even taken her first breath.

Dead, before she’d ever really been alive.

Laurel breaks down into sobs as soon as the realization hits her, brutal and merciless, slicing through every inch of her like a knife. She breaks down into sobs even before the doctor finally turns to them with a grave look on her face, lips pursed tight, and says the three damning words: _I’m so sorry_. Frank, who had somehow held onto the last few shreds of hope until then, breaks as soon as he hears the words, shaking his head, growling at the woman, _No. No, you’re wrong. You’re fucking… You’re wrong._

But he stops, after a while, and turns back to her, crying without restraint. He takes her hand. Tries to say something, be strong for her, but the words die on his tongue, and his mouth falls shut, and he’s lost, again. The sobs wrack her body too, so hard they hurt and she almost chokes on them, and she can’t breathe – God, she can’t _breathe_. She turns her head to the side, reflexively hiding her face, for some reason, though really she wants nothing more than to scream as loud as she can, let the whole world hear her, know her loss. She wants to scream. Scream. Wail. _Shriek_. Still, she’s too weak to do anything but cry pitifully, the tears rolling down her cheeks silently, now and then punctuated by rough, guttural sobs.

Then, all of a sudden, there’s a voice behind them.

“Would you like to hold her?”

Laurel stops mid-sob, going tense and turning her head. The nurse is standing there next to them, tiny white bundle cradled in her arms – not moving or crying, just lying there, the littlest thing she’s ever seen. Frank calms himself for a moment, too; long enough to glance at the nurse, then look back to her, deferring to Laurel without question.

But after a moment she just shakes her head, and turns away once more, recoiling from the sight. “No. N-no.”

“Laurel…” Frank’s voice is hoarse, an air of caution hanging over him.

She doesn’t want to. Really, truly, honest to God doesn’t want to hold her. She doesn’t care if it makes her a terrible mother. She’s not a mother at all now. And she doesn’t want to.

She _can’t_.

“ _No_ ,” Laurel chokes out again, shaking her head violently. “I said… I said _no_.”

For a moment, with her head facing the other way, she can’t see anything. Then, Frank murmurs something, and she hears the sound of rustling, which she can only assume is the baby being passed over into his arms instead, and then the door closing, as the nurse leaves to give them a moment alone. Frank’s not crying, now, just sniffling, holding the shattered pieces of himself together with some miraculous goddamn strength she’ll never understand.

For a long moment, all she hears is silence. That same empty, hollow, horrible silence that should be filled with cries, happy tears, screams of new life. Then-

“She’s beautiful,” he rasps, his words thick with tears, but steady. He sucks in a breath. “Jesus, she’s… she’s so beautiful, Laurel.”

The words only make her cry harder. She raises her first to her mouth, sobbing into it, still turned away. She’s scared to death of what will happen if she looks. If she looks, if she sees her, her baby girl… She knows she’ll love her. Knows _how much_ she’ll love her, and how much she’ll get attached, so much that she’ll never want to give her up, and if this is what she has to do to make letting go easier, then she’ll do it. She won’t hold her.

Detach. Disconnect. It’s the only way she’ll stomach this, the only way she’ll survive. It’s for the best, but just because it’s _for the best_ doesn’t mean it isn’t eating her insides raw like acid, chewing her up, leaving her empty. She’d never known it was possible to feel agony like this, agony that isn’t physical. She’d never known it was possible for a person to _hurt_ so much.

But Frank keeps talking, with awe in his every word. “Never… never seen a more beautiful baby. Ever. She’s perfect, I mean that. God, you should see her…”

Finally, she steadies her voice long enough to tell him, “Can you, um… c-can you just… tell me what she looks like? I don’t wanna – I don’t wanna hold her, but-”

She goes silent, still refusing to look at them, curled in on herself like a turtle retreating into its shell. It takes Frank a while to reply, and he clears his throat again before he begins, his every word dripping with more love and tenderness than she’s ever heard in her life.

“She’s tiny,” he manages. “So tiny. Like a doll, but… even smaller. She’d pretty much fit in my hands, I think. She’s got… little pink lips. Pink everything. I-” His voice breaks. Still, he pushes through for her sake, continuing on. “And her fingers. She’s got ten of ‘em. All perfect. Think… she’s got your nose, kind of.” He gives a laugh, sniffling. “Think she looks like you. More than me. _Way_ more than me.”

All she can do is sob as she listens, fingers clinging desperately to the side of the bed where she rests, until her knuckles turn ghost-white. She won’t look. Can’t look, no matter how much she wants to. They’ve stitched her back up by now, and her body will start to heal, but she knows that if she holds her, all the other parts of her never will. The wound will always be raw and bloody. It’d kill her.

Frank’s voice, however, breaks through her reverie once more.

“You gotta hold her, Laurel,” he croaks. She can hear him shifting in his seat, no doubt angling himself and the baby towards her. “You gotta see her. Just… Just once. Please.”

Something in his voice breaks her resolve, right then. Maybe it’s the desperation, the gentle urging – or the lilting notes of tenderness. But whatever it may be, it finally compels her to turn her head and look sideways at where Frank sits, their daughter snuggled safely in his arms. His eyes are still teary, but they’re two blue pools of sheer tenderness now, with pride glimmering in them, along with something… Something dangerously close to happiness. Joy.

Finally, she nods.

“Okay.” She sucks in a trembling breath, sitting up slightly. “Give her to me.”

As he passes the baby into her arms, briefly, it strikes Laurel for the first time just how unfair it all is, how it shouldn’t _be_ this way. Holding her daughter for the first time should be the most wonderful moment in her life, not the most excruciating. The bundle in her arms should be squirming, squalling; not lying limp and lifeless and growing colder by the second, forced out of the safe haven of her womb prematurely. She should’ve _stayed_ there. She should’ve stayed inside her, where she had been safe, sheltered by her body. The misery overtakes her before she can help it – and she’s about to change her mind at the last second and turn away once more, when she catches a glimpse of her daughter’s face.

It takes her breath away. Immediately, she stops crying, goes still, because… He’s right.

Frank is right. She’s beautiful. Perfect. She’s never seen a more perfect baby before in her life.

Her little eyes are closed. If she didn’t know better, Laurel would think she was just dozing. Her skin is pruned and pink. She has a head of dark, downy hair, cupid’s bow lip, a chin that curves gently and stubby fingers the size of… God, she doesn’t even know, they’re so tiny. She’s light, the lightest weight in the world, yet somehow the heaviest, to Laurel. She fits into the crook of her arm like she was made to be there, and Laurel knows she was: made to be there, made from her. Her heart swells as she takes in the sight of her, committing each minuscule detail to memory: from the way her hair feels when she strokes it, to the almost imperceptible furrow of her brow, to the silky-smoothness of her skin.

She’s so scared she’ll forget it all. That’s what she’s afraid of, deep down; not getting too attached, being unable to let go… She’s so afraid she’ll forget what her daughter looks like in this moment that she wants to weep all over again.

“She is,” Laurel breathes, sniffling. “Perfect. I didn’t… I-I didn’t know it was… possible, for…”

She drifts off. Thankfully, Frank finishes for her, “For somebody to be so perfect?”

“Yeah.” Laurel nods, meeting his eyes. “But I don’t wanna… I…”

“Don’t what?”

“I-I don’t wanna forget her,” she squeaks. “I don’t wanna forget her, Frank, and I don’t wanna let her go…”

“We, uh,” he stops abruptly, clearing his throat. “We got time with her. Much as we need, the nurse said-”

“I know we have time with her right now,” Laurel tells him, biting back a sob. “I just meant…”

“Yeah,” is all he says. “Yeah, no. I know what you meant.”

They don’t talk much, after that; not much beyond soft remarks about how beautiful she is, over and over. Frank starts to sing to her, once, some Italian lullaby his mother had always sung to him, but he doesn’t get more than a minute in before he breaks down, and when he does Laurel reaches out to draw him into her shoulder, right next to her chest, with their daughter. Her heart swells with love, and at the same time shrivels inside her with every passing minute, like a withering flower. They try to come up with a name, at some point. Carina. Mia. Lucia. All beautiful names, just right for her.

They never settle on one. Can’t bring themselves to do it, and so they remain like that for God knows how long, alone in the cold, sterile little room, the baby settled peacefully in her arms. Clutching each other, huddled together in the stillness.

A tiny little family, if only for a moment.

 

\--

 

It’s a quiet kind of loss.

Not like the death of someone older, an adult, who had the chance to live, breathe, _be_. There’s no obituary in the paper, no pall-bearers holding a casket or crowd of mourners dressed in black or eulogies recalling happy memories in her life. Laurel supposes you can’t write an obituary for someone who never really lived. It would be blank.

Nothing in it but an identical date of birth, and date of death.

Their daughter had done nothing, nothing to write down or chronicle, at least. Never even taken a breath of air – but she was alive. Irrevocably, totally, completely alive. She lived, even if it was inside her, only for eight months. She had done nothing, and everything; changed nothing, and changed everything.

It’s strange, to enter the hospital pregnant and leave un-pregnant and not have anything to show for all those months. She was just… gone. Disappeared, almost like she’d never existed at all. _She had_ , Laurel tells herself, when those dark thoughts worm their way into her head. She had existed. There’s evidence of it written in the field of stretch marks across her stomach, which Frank had caressed during her pregnancy with love and called battle scars when she’d complained about how ugly they’d looked. There’s evidence in the swelling of her breasts, full of milk, aching for a baby to suckle, and there’s nothing she can do but endure the agony of her body’s instincts as she slowly, tortuously slowly, dries up.   

There’s evidence of her everywhere, and she’s nowhere. And it kills them both.

Laurel retreats into herself instinctively, spends weeks in bed, so caught up in her own misery that she almost doesn’t notice Frank’s. She almost doesn’t notice the heaviness in his step, the tiredness in his demeanor; not the kind from a lack of sleep, but the kind that becomes part of a person, ingrained in their skin by loss. She almost doesn’t notice the way that, even as the months pass, he still stops and looks at children when they’re out and about on the street, with so much sorrow in his eyes, so much longing. He acts strong, holds things together outwardly, and puts on a brave face and goes back to work for Annalise, pretending that nothing is wrong – when it is.

She almost doesn’t notice his misery, until one evening three months later, when she steps through the door of their apartment after a long, hard day of work, and finds herself met by darkness.

The place is oddly silent. They’d moved to a two-bedroom in preparation for the baby months ago, larger than his old apartment, but he’s nowhere to be found in the kitchen or living room, nor is he in the first bedroom down the hall, their bedroom, when normally he’s cooking dinner by the time she gets home, or changing out of his work clothes. Instead, at the end of the hall, she can see a light on, the door cracked open in the second bedroom.

The room that was going to be the nursery.

Her heart in her throat, she makes her way down the hall and pushes the door open, anticipating the worst, but she calms herself as soon as she takes a look around. She hasn’t set foot in here in months – they’d both agreed it would be best to stay out of the nursery, keep everything in it but not use it as some morbid shrine – and it looks just as she remembers it did, the last time she was in here towards the end of her pregnancy, when she’d helped him paint the walls before complaining about her aching back and spending the rest of the afternoon slacking off and eating chips, watching him paint instead. The walls are pale yellow, the carpet cream-colored. There’s a rocking chair in the corner, sitting unused. A changing table, equally bare. A mobile, with colorful little hot air balloons and clouds suspended by pieces of string, far too cheerful for this desolate place.

And in the middle of it all is the empty crib, over by the window; the crib they’ll never use, doing nothing but collecting dust. In front of it stands Frank, his hands resting on the side, peering down into the space where their daughter should rest.

Her heart breaks at the sight. He hadn’t heard her come in, and for a moment she just stands there watching him, tears flooding her eyes, a deluge she can do nothing to stop up. She’d thought she was getting better, as the months had gone by; she’d thought it was getting better, the _pain_ , the cruelly unfulfilled longing. She’d thought she was okay, moving on, letting go – but taking one step inside the abandoned nursery is all it takes to make her realize that she isn’t, not at all, and neither is he.

“Frank.”

Her voice cracks pathetically when she speaks. Startled, he glances back at her, and when he does she can see the tears in his eyes, too; tears that she can tell he’s trying his damnedest not to shed. Frank sniffs the moment he sees her, shaking his head and standing up straight, the universal sign of _Don’t worry, I’m fine_.

“I, uh,” he stops, clearing his throat. “I know we said we weren’t gonna go in here and think about her. And I haven’t been. But…”

She shakes her head, approaching him. “Frank…”

“I just…” He turns away, resting his hands on the side of the crib once more. “I was passin’ by, after work. I thought about the day we painted this room, got it all ready for her to come home to. We were talking about how much she’d love it, and I wondered… I don’t know. If it still looked the same, or somethin’. I… Look, gimme a sec, and I’ll leave, and I won’t come in here again-”

“Frank…” she says his name, swallowing a sob in the same breath.

“But I…” Frank drifts off, eyes still locked on the crib, as broken a man as she’s ever seen in her life. “She should be here.”

In three quick strides, she finishes crossing the room, and before Frank can say another word she all but flings herself against him and coils her arms around him from behind and holds on for dear life. The sob looses itself from her throat before she can stop it, rough and hard, and when he hears it Frank dissolves into tears too, breaking away and turning around so that he’s finally facing her. As soon as she does, Laurel reaches out and draws his head down to her shoulder, clinging to his shirt like she’s a drowning woman and he’s her last lifeline. At first she tries to maintain some semblance of composure, be _the strong one_ instead of him for once, but that lasts all of two seconds, and soon she’s in no better a state than he is, crying until her chest hurts and her eyes are surrounded by broken capillaries, until hiccups take the place of her sobs, and they stay like that, holding each other in what should be the happiest room in the whole apartment, which is now just haunted by painful would-be memories, what-ifs. Things that never were.

“The doctor…” Laurel manages to say, withdrawing slightly to look him in the eyes but keeping her forehead pressed against his. She reaches up, strokes his cheek. “The doctor said we’re both still young. And healthy. A-and that we can… try to have another baby. Try again.”

“I know.” Frank pauses, gulping. “I know we can try again, but… Fuck, Laurel, I don’t want another kid. I wanted her.”

 _I wanted her_. She’s not sure she’s ever heard three words that hurt her more, and in seconds she’s crying helplessly again, drawing him against her, holding his head to her shoulder. _I wanted her. I_ still _want her. I want her back, I want her here with us, and it’s not fair, it’s not fair…_

“I know,” she breathes, burying her face into his neck and squeezing him tighter. “I know you did.” _I did, too. So, so much. Just breathe, now._

_All we can do is breathe, now._

 

\--

 

It’s more than a year later when, for the second time in her life, Laurel Castillo finds herself confronted by two tiny black lines on a pregnancy test.

She’d gone back on the pill, after losing the baby. They hadn’t talked about it, or even considered trying again any time soon; the wound was still too fresh, gaping wide open. So she pops the trusty little pill every night before bed, not even thinking about it, comfortably numb. She doesn’t try to broach the subject of having another baby to Frank. Knows that, most likely, he’ll shoot it down, retreat inside himself. She can’t say she blames him, and part of her isn’t sure she wants to try again, either. The possibility of knowing that kind of pain, that kind of loss for a second time… It terrifies her to her core.

So she pops the trusty little pill like clockwork, until that chilly Saturday afternoon in November as she sits in their bathroom staring down a positive pregnancy test, when it turns out the little pill isn’t so _trusty_ at all.

She’s afraid, at first, and then, as the minutes pass, that fear still doesn’t ebb away like it had the first time she’d sat here, receiving the same news. They’d planned to get pregnant before. This? This isn’t planned, and after what Frank had said, words she’ll never forget – _I don’t want another kid. I wanted her_ – she has no way of knowing how he’ll react. But she goes to him even so, finding Frank standing at the counter, whipping up two sandwiches for their lunch, his back facing her. She has the test clutched in her hand, plain to see, and it takes a moment before the sound of her footsteps register in his ears. The moment they do, he turns, and upon seeing the crease of worry in her forehead and the hesitance in her stance, Frank frowns.

“What’s goin’ on?” His eyes drop to the white plastic stick, and he gestures to it. “What’s that?”

Laurel doesn’t answer. She just takes a step towards him – then two, then three, until she’s right in front of him, and holds out the test, tries not to tremble. Bewildered, Frank grasps it and raises it to his face. It takes him a moment to realize what she’s trying to tell him, and when he does a series of emotions flicker behind his eyes, quick in succession, so fast she almost can’t discern one from another.

First comes surprise. Second comes worry. Third comes something like sorrow – because it calls to mind the time they did this before, no doubt; the time they’d rejoiced at the news, only to have everything torn away later.

Fourth? Fourth… That’s when Laurel finally catches a glimpse of happiness.

It starts as a tiny spark, barely perceptible, before it catches fire like a lick of flame to kindling, and spreads in seconds. A smile pulls at his lips, and before she knows it he’s picking her up and spinning her around in the middle of the kitchen, kissing her deeply.

“You’re serious?” he asks. “You – this is real?”

She gives a tearful laugh, sniffling. “Yeah. Y-yeah, this is real.”

He notices her hesitance, and frowns, letting her down. “Hey. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she tells him, lowering her eyes. “I, um, I just didn’t… I thought you’d be upset.”

“Upset?” he scoffs. “How the hell could I be-”

Frank stops, right then, as if suddenly remembering why, exactly, he would be upset. Laurel can see the way the memory weighs him down, how it hangs over him like a storm cloud, and she knows how it feels – but out of nowhere this news is like a ray of light peeking through the grimness, as the storm starts to abate after so long, the clouds dispersing; a rainbow, after all the horror, and the pain, and the loss; their loss, quiet and near-silent, but earth-shattering all the same.

“We’re not gonna forget,” Laurel asserts. “I don’t want us to forget her. Ever.”

“We won’t,” he promises right back, leaning down to peck her on the forehead. “Never.”

A moment of silence passes, as he draws her into his chest, enfolding her in his arms. Laurel is the one to break it.

“I’m scared,” she confesses against his shirt, voice muffled. “Scared that… The same thing will happen again. That something bad will-”

“It won’t.”

She frowns, pulling back to look at him. “How can you know that?”

“I just got a feeling,” is all Frank supplies her with, but she’s never seen him look surer of anything. “It’s gonna work out this time. I know it.”

Laurel does too, somehow. She has a feeling in her bones – a good one. Before they’d dismantled the nursery, torn down the crib they’d built together with their own hands. They’ll build it again. They have another chance. Not a do-over, like their daughter is something to be erased – but another chance. She’ll always be theirs, Laurel knows that, and they’ll never forget her, but now… Things have the chance to be okay, again. Things will be okay, again.

 _Not just okay_ , she decides as Frank draws her against him, his large hand reaching down to rest on her flat belly, the tiny life there planted like a seed of hope.

Not just okay. More than okay.


End file.
